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Addendum
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OK, now let's talk about some issues that were glossed over
in this tutorial...
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One major cheat that we did in this tutorial is writing
our game sentences using symbols:
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'(this is not how Lispers usually write text -)
"Lispers write text using double quotes"
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Symbols have a special meaning in Lisp and are used to store
unique names of functions, variables, and other things. Because
of this, Lisp treats symbols in special ways that are awkward
for text messages. Using strings instead of symbols allows text
we work with to not be affected by any such quirks, but
requires more esoteric commands for manipulating text. Also,
working with strings is not so relevant to teaching the far
more important symbol manipulation commands in Lisp.
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Another simplification is that association lists (also called
alists) are usually written using a
dotted list, because it is slighlty more efficient and
elegant to an experienced Lisper. This is confusing to
beginners, however, because it requires an understanding of
Cons Cells.
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Another glossed over issue is that SPELs are more commonly
referred to as "Lisp true macros" and are created with the
defmacro command, which is very confusing for teaching
purposes. Read the following short essay to understand why I
think this name distinction is beneficial. And finally, there
are ugly name collisions that can happen when a SPEL is written
in the style of the game-action SPEL. If you read more
advanced Lisp materials this will be explained in greater detail.
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